


Darling, Dearest, Dead.

by reidbyers



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 04:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11283927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reidbyers/pseuds/reidbyers
Summary: Ever since Spencer was a little boy he had been haunted with misfortune, a wave of bad luck striking everyone who dared cause him pain. It followed him throughout his life until he joined the BAU, suddenly he wasn’t haunted by fabricated repercussions of his adolescent angst. Until one night he got a phone call that reminded him too much of home and the possibility arose that there was something more behind the horrors that followed him, something much darker than he could ever had expected.





	1. Prologue.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was posted first on my tumblr "reidbyers" so go follow me there to get new chapters first!

Spencer Reid grew up being a lonely boy.

His intelligence outmatched his ability to make friends, even at a young age people could tell he was different and the other children only wanted to be friends with the people like them. It wasn’t something he could just switch, he’d go into school on Monday with a plan to act normal and then all his peers would be begging to be his friend, this never happened but every Monday without a doubt he would go in with his glasses hidden and information stocked up about the latest cartoons instead of classic literature.

Despite his efforts, Spencer never made any friends. He spent elementary school with his nose buried in a book or his hand stuck up in the air, his mother reassured him that he was perfect the way he was and when he was older people would understand how special she was; if Spencer wasn’t so aware that his mother was mentally ill then maybe he would have been comforted by her words.

It wasn’t only people not wanting to be his friend that distressed Spencer, it was the people who made it their mission to know how disliked he was. He could handle being ignored but having other people go out of their way to bully him was too much. He got overwhelmed easily, anyone going through the almost of exile he was would feel the same way.

They called him every name under the son, children with parents filled with venom became just as poisoned and once he got into middle school they were trying with all their might to make him the same way. His strangeness only developed with age and now everyone had the vocabulary and means to make sure that no one else acted like Spencer did.

One day Spencer ran home from school crying, trying desperately to fix his glasses despite knowing there was no way he could. An older boy at school named Daniel had pushed him face first into the lockers, breaking his glasses and almost giving him a bloody nose, no teachers were around to witness it and therefore he got away with his assault. The rest of the day Spencer couldn’t read, when he was called upon in English to read the book they were reading he was unable to and the teacher called him out for being “making things up.”

Spencer had relied on his teachers to boost up his confidence, most of them liked him but understood why he was picked on heavily so to have one accuse him of lying was a huge hit to his self esteem. He had just apologised and tried desperately to squint and read the text, his head still ringing from the impact with the lockers.

When he got home after school that day he had ran upstairs to his room, not even checking to see what his mom was doing which he made sure to do every time in case she was having one of her episodes. When he arrived at his bedroom he slammed the door and threw his bag down on the ground before marching over to his bed and throwing himself down onto it.

“I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.” Spencer chanted into his pillow, his hands balled up into tight fists as he tried to stop himself from crying. Even after dealing with bullies for his whole life he’d never had a tantrum like this, he just needed someway to get all his frustration out and that way was to scream into his pillow. At least if he did this he wouldn’t have an outburst around his mom, that would only make things far worse. “I wish he was dead!”

Realistically, Spencer didn’t want him dead. He was just a stupid fourteen year old boy who didn’t know any better, what he actually wanted was for him to leave him alone and stop harassing him but in the moment he couldn’t articulate it the way he wanted.

A cold shiver ran down his spine and Spencer froze immediately, it had felt like the scratch of someone’s long nails running down the length of his back. It left him holding his breath and scrunching his eyes closed as he quickly rationalised all the thoughts running through his mind. It wasn’t until a crash happened outside his room that he shot up, crawling to the corner of the bed and clutching his knees tight to his chest.

“Spencer? Are you there?” The sound of his mother’s voice made Spencer relax on command, it was just her making that racket. Spencer wiped his eyes dry from the wetness pooling in the corners and scooted off of his bed, taking his shoes off and putting them in his wardrobe before going and helping his mom with whatever she had done.

It was easy to forget about things when you had a mentally ill mother to look after, all his attention was focused on making sure she had taken her medication and wasn’t having one of her dark days, double checking she had eaten and washed herself. It was a lot of things for a twelve year old boy to handle but he was willing to do it for her, the most important person in his life.

He fell asleep that night cuddled up in more blankets than he normally did, his room was colder than it usually was but he put that down to perhaps the heating bill hadn’t been paid. It was at the exact moment he managed to fall asleep that across the town the boy who had pushed him into the lockers that day shot awake.

Daniel shot up in bed, the sudden feeling that he was going to vomit hitting him. He tried to stand up and get out of bed but instead he just fell onto his floor, his head pounding with the worst headache of his life and his vision too blurry to see where he was going. He cried out for his parents while laying in a crumpled heap on the floor, his face which was pressed tight up against the carpet might have been have been uncomfortable if he could feel it.

Spencer went into school the next day, usually he would be met with a couple of bullies at his locker but today there were none. He went about his business in peace before another student about his age walked up to him and asked if he had heard about what happened to Daniel Atkins.

“Apparently he had a stroke! There’s gonna be an assembly about him before lunch, Lauren told me that he’s in a total vegetable state!” The boy exclaimed as if it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard, he’d been going around telling anyone who would listen because interesting things like this never happened. Spencer frowned and closed his locker slowly, holding his bag close to his body as he continued to listen what had happened. “Her mom told mine, she said they woke up to him screaming in a pile of his own puke! Doctors said a blood vessel in his brain burst and he got blood in his brain, gross right?!”

“That sounds like a Hemorrhagic stroke, if a vessel bursts then the brain and it’s cells can’t receive oxygen and nutrients and causes pressure to build up in surrounding tissues. Brain damage is the most common effect.” Spencer rambled on, more so explaining what he had happened to himself rather than to the other boy who now had the scientific definition was much less interested and walked off.

His outburst from the night before didn’t cross his mind once, it wasn’t that he’d forgotten but rather it wasn’t logical he had anything to do with it. There were many more logical reasons as to why it had happened: head trauma, high blood pressure, liver disease, the list went on and on and no where on that list was his dumb tantrum.

It was announced at the assembly that Daniel was in a coma, his stroke had been severe and sudden and all the students were to keep him in their thoughts. Spencer while knowing it was immoral didn’t spend another second of his time thinking about him, without their ringleader no one was bullying him and he was finally left alone.

That was of course until Daniel died, then Spencer thought about him a lot.

Eventually though he got himself to forget and move on, he had bigger things to think about like the fact his intelligence was being noticed and appreciated as he was in high school at the young age of twelve and he had a much larger crowd of people to handle now.

People didn’t take him seriously, no matter how smart he was everyone just thought he was a freak. The older they got the longer the venom in them had to settle, it came easier and more potent than ever and they now had the perfect target.

Spencer was tied stripped naked and tied to a goalpost after thinking his crush wanted to meet up with him. He was almost angrier at himself than he was at the football team for doing what they had done because he had forgotten one of his facts: girls didn’t like him, they never had and he couldn’t see them ever liking him. He’d let his guard down and now he was being humiliated, no matter how hard he begged for them to let him go they didn’t.

They left him tied up there with no intention of helping him get out, it wasn’t until half an hour to midnight that he managed to wiggle his way out of the rope and savage around for his clothes. By the time he’d gotten home it was midnight and his mom was still up, cuddled up in her chair with a book.

“Spencer, how was school?” She asked like she did every day and Spencer had to bite his tongue to stop himself tearing up. No one had been looking for him, not even his own mother. He couldn’t blame her, it wasn’t her fault she was going through one of her episodes but it hurt knowing that he could have been out there all night and she would have been too buried in her book to even notice her own son wasn’t home.

“It was good. I’m really tired though, mom. I think I’m going to go to bed early.” Spencer spoke softer than usual as he worried if he didn’t she would hear the crack in his voice, before she could reply he was turning and walking up the stairs. She watched him closely before determining that whatever she sensed from him really was just exhaustion and turned back to her book.

Spencer arrived at his bedroom, standing in the door frame for a few seconds just processing everything that happened before walking inside. He slipped his bag off and put it on his desk, kicking off his shoes before laying down. Despite the tired pull on his eyes begging him to close them he kept staring up at the ceiling, playing back the last time he had come home nearly this upset.

He recalled the way he chanted his hatred like a prayer, talking to whoever would hear him. Spencer didn’t believe in god, it was a possibility he hadn’t taken into account when thinking about everything that could have caused Daniel’s stroke. Even now he couldn’t take the idea seriously, it didn’t make sense to him.

“I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.” Spencer said quietly, unlike last time there was no passion behind his words. The words didn’t have the same taste, he was just repeating them for the sake of it, remembering with ease how everything had went down. “I wish he was dead.”

As if on cue he felt a shiver run down him, it didn’t freak him out as much as last time because he had chosen to believe he had reacted with that feeling because his words made him guilty, it made sense to him he’d feel uncomfortable with wishing for someone’s death like that even if he didn’t mean it.

This time though it was different, that shiver still hit but there was a sudden coldness that wrapped tightly around his neck. It didn’t feel like a hand, too airy and soft, instead there was just the pressure as if someone was holding their hand inches away from his neck and pushing as hard as they could. Spencer felt the chill run down the length of his neck and throat, he was just as terrified as before yet still trying to apply logic to the feeling.

Then, it vanished. Spencer batted his eyes before holding his hand up to this throat, it was colder than the rest of his body and stung, like he had just been choked. The shiver he could explain, this however was a completely different experience.

That night he couldn’t sleep despite being exhausted. He lay awake all night staring up at his ceiling and going over and over again what had happened to him, when the sun started to rise he sat at his window sill and watched it until he couldn’t stay awake any longer and fell asleep against the window.

When he woke up and took a glance at his clock he realised he was late to school, since he had fallen asleep in the clothes he wore the day before he didn’t bother to change and instead just grabbed his shoes and bag before hurrying down the stairs.

“They cancelled school.” Diana informed Spencer from where she was sat at the breakfast table, he stopped dead in his tracks and looked over to her. “A student collapsed after having a stroke on his way inside, I just received the phone call.”

“Hemorrhagic?”

“They don’t know yet, Spencer. Don’t get ahead of yourself.” She warned him before opening the newspaper again and starting to read, Spencer just stood there and stared at her like it would somehow cure all the emotions running through him. When it didn’t he head back upstairs and chose to work from home.

When news spread that the boy who had collapsed was the captain of the football team Chad Peters and he had died at the hospital from an intense hemorrhage, Spencer felt nothing like he did when almost the same thing happened before. This time he felt sick, even though this boy had humiliated him and made him feel like shit he shouldn’t have died.

The second death of a young boy from a stroke left the city in panic, making conspiracy theories as to why this was happening and what they could do to stop it. They never got to put their theories to the test though because after Chad there were no more random strokes, it just stopped and the deaths were seen as just freak accidents.

Spencer did his best to go through the rest of his academic life avoiding conflict in anyways, that meant avoiding people in general and he remained being that lonely little boy from when he was a child. There were some things that never changed and for Spencer that happened to be both his lack of social skills but also his overwhelming guilt.

Despite there being no evidence or logical reasoning as to why he’d have anything to do with the deaths he still took responsibility. It wasn’t until he was much older and time had passed that he put his reasoning down to stress, he had a schizophrenic mother who could barely look after herself and that for any young child and teenager would be stressful - no wonder he came up with the delusion of a spirit to somehow deal with all the horror around him.

Many years later Spencer joined the BAU. Even after seeing all of the depravities of the human existence day upon day, trying to fight an evil that some would argue would never disappear, it made Spencer feel good knowing he was doing something to help - even if it was just one person.

Nine years after joining, Spencer awoke to a phone call. He groaned into his pillow and reached out to his bedside table, rummaging around for his phone until he eventually found it.

“Hello?” He turned his head away from the pillow so he could mumble the greeting, his eyes still closed despite now being awake from the loud beeping, jolting him out of the pleasant dream he’d been having.

“We’ve got a case, two families of three all just got emitted to the hospital after each suffering from a stroke. They want us to see if any foul play happened.” Garcia’s voice was loud and chipper despite her words, he sighed and in his sleepy state just told her he’d be there in half an hour before hanging up and dropping his phone off of the side of the bed. Even though he’d told her he’d be there in half an hour and it took at least twenty to get there from his apartment, Spencer curled back under his sheets and tried to enjoy the warmth.

Only it wasn’t warm anymore, the sheets were cold like no one had been using them and it brought Spencer up in goosebumps. He rolled onto his side and tried to find the most comfortable mission, that was until he felt something press up behind him.

If he wasn’t still so half asleep then he would have turned around to see what was happening, instead he lay there frozen in fear. The pressure didn’t feel completely solid, it was cold and hollow and felt like if Spencer was to lean back against it whatever it was would break.

He wasn’t as scared as he could have been or used to be because he knew more things now, things like Sleep Paralysis existed and could explain all of the feelings he had felt and did feel, though he had never been diagnosed with having it.

It wasn’t until he felt two fingers press up against his temple, sharp nails and freezing cold fingertips that he jumped. Spencer forced himself to flip over and look at whatever was touching him, instead of some horrific monster or ghost like he was expecting he was just met with the empty side of his bed. He was about to breath a sigh of relief when he felt something brush his hair away from his ear and breathe softly into it.

_“Go play saint.”_

 


	2. Chapter One.

Spencer wrapped his coat tighter around himself as he walked onto the crime scene, it was verging on five am and yet inside stood around the rest of the team. None of them looked like they particularly wanted to be there, stood in one of the houses where a family of three had all just suffered strokes in the middle of the night but it was suspicious and was their job to see if someone had been involved with what had happened to them.

“What do we know?” Spencer asked Garcia who was perched on the couch in her fluffiest coat, her laptop sat on her lap while she furiously typed away on it while trying to get information back on the family from the hospital. They’d had plenty of weird cases but this was was quickly climbing it’s way up to the top.

“The Cole Family, mother and father Denise and John and fifteen year old son Caleb. They all suffered from a Hemorrhagic stroke at around two am this morning, the neighbours were awoken by the presumably screams of pain.” Garcia cringed as she read the report, it made no sense to her how three people could all have a stroke at the same time and it be considered to be from natural causes but then again, she wasn’t the doctor.

“Hemorrhagic strokes account for about 13 percent of stroke cases so to have three people living under the same roof to suffer one at the same time, it’s unheard of.” Spencer reeled of the fact with ease as he walked across to the fireplace in the middle of the room and looked at the family portrait sitting dead in the middle of the mantel. They looked like a happy family, all beaming with pride and full of live. There were things that could cause a stroke like drugs or alcohol but not a Hemorrhagic one, those were due to high blood pressure, an aneurysm, a blood vessel leaking. It was possible someone could create those symptoms and that would cause a stroke, they’d have to wait for the drug test to see. “40 percent of stroke deaths are Hemorrhagic.”

JJ sighed and rubbed her temple, cases involving families always got to her but this one for some reason was hurting in particular. Maybe because she didn’t understand how it had happened, there were chemical and social explanations for serial killers but the sheer impossibility of this case and the fact no one knew what they could do to stop it happening again truly terrified her. A cold shiver ran down her back and she immediately tensed up, doing her best to stand still until it was over. It was a cold day so she didn’t think anything of it, maybe just to get a warmer coat.

Spencer was doing his best to appear normal, as much as he wanted not to force his own biased view on what was going on here he couldn’t ignore how closely this related to the deaths back in his childhood. Two boys both dying from a sudden stroke, it had been years since he’d thought about them but now he couldn’t stop feeling all that guilt. He convinced himself that he had nothing to do with their deaths, it was impossible. Then again, the house he was standing in just had something pretty impossible happen so maybe rather than impossible it just wasn’t in the human capacity to understand.

“What about the second family?” Alex asked while putting her rubber gloves on, she wasn’t looking forward to going and checking out the rooms in which the family had collapsed but she hoped they would lead to some explanations as to what was happening.

“Single mother and two daughters, mom Alice Lutton and daughters Lea and Elizabeth also suffered a Hemorrhagic stroke at two am this morning. It gets weirder though, if you can believe that.” Garcia shook her head and typed furiously until she had whatever she could find on the surprising twist. “There’s a third daughter named Iris, she was seen entering the house by neighbours but no one saw her leave and she wasn’t in the house when the medics came?”

“So, where is she?” Hotch said slowly as he too put his gloves on, he was about to tell everyone which room they’d be looking in before Garcia interrupted him with a gasp, her nose scrunching up at the discovery she had just made. “What is it?”

“Oh, yikes. Both these houses are on like a bunch of creepy haunted websites, talking about haunted places not a haunted website…obviously.” Garcia frowned down at her screen before turning her laptop around so the rest of the team could see her discovery, Spencer walked back around the couch and bent over so he could too see. It turned out that the previous owners of the house reported loud bangs during the night, cold spots in certain areas of the house even during the hottest of summers and the last owner said that he’d wake up feeling as if he was being choked even though there was no one there.

“Come on, that can’t have anything to do with this. Like seriously? Ghosts?” Morgan knew he shouldn’t laugh but he couldn’t help it, there was photo evidence of bruising around his neck so he had been choked but he could have done it himself, gotten someone else to do it so that all these ghost believers would get all hyped up. He’d admit something weird was going on but he wasn’t about to start believing in the paranormal because of it.

“Who said anything about ghosts? It’s much worse than that, we’re talking demons here.” Garcia rolled her eyes and turned the laptop back around so she could continue scanning the website for information, whether it was because of her upbringing or not she was unsure but she was one of those believers Morgan sometimes made fun of. It seemed ludicrous to say anything was impossible, the world was so big and complicated that who was to say that ghosts didn’t exist in some capacity, demons too.

“You really want us to tell everyone that it was a demon that caused these people to have a stroke? Yeah, that’ll go down well.” Morgan scoffed before Hotch began to speak, wanting to stop anymore tension from developing. He understood that everyone would have much preferred to be back in bed or at least have a less complicated case to work on but this was their situation so what was there to do but get on with the job?

“Okay, JJ and Reid I want you to go to the Lutton house, we’ll compare crime scenes and see if we can connect this in any other way than the physical symptoms.” Hotch then said before nodding in the direction of the stairs, Morgan and Alex glanced over to the other two before following after Hotch. JJ began to make her way to the car but Spencer stopped to take one last look over at the photo frame, Garcia noticed his strange behaviour even though he was trying to act like his normal self. She might not have been a profiler but she knew her friends.

“Are you okay? Excuse my terminology but you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Penelope lowered her laptop screen and looked up at Spencer, he looked exhausted but then again everyone did. It was going to be a long day and considering the confusing nature of the case it was also going to be a long one, Spencer was just acting a little different from everyone else though.

Spencer paused and thought about how he should answer, in reality he wasn’t okay but he couldn’t say that in the fear that it would make Garcia worry about him more and if she told anyone else he might get removed off of the case for not being fit enough. How could he explain to her that he was having cold flashes and hearing voices, that he thought he possibility could have killed two people back in his childhood in some unknown way? He felt like he was slowly going insane but he also knew the only way to work through that was to learn more, knowledge was power after all.

“What does it say about demons?” Spencer looked around to see if JJ had noticed if he wasn’t with her, she had and was now sat in the car looking through her phone while she waited. He didn’t want to waste any of her time but he also wanted to see what this website had to say. Garcia immediately thought his question was weird because to her knowledge Spencer wasn’t a believer at all.

“Um, lots of things.” She began to search for the basics as Spencer crouched down beside her and looked at the screen, trying to read everything as she scrolled past it. “There’s a distinct difference between ghosts and demons, ghosts are a fragment of their past selves constantly on a loop. A ghost cannot do harm as they are like a record stuck repeating the same part of a song over and over again, demons however can and will cause harm as they aren’t from human origin. Ghosts are stuck between here and whatever the afterlife is for some reason where as demons are to torment and harm people.”

“Why? What are they gaining?” Garcia turned and looked towards Spencer, not even she thought this case had anything to do with the houses being supposedly haunted and yet Spencer seemed to be buying into the idea completely. It made her think that there was something he wasn’t telling her but knowing him he wouldn’t tell her if he thought even the slightest that it would get anyone into trouble.

“They just do it, they want to hurt people and no one knows why.” Spencer nodded at Garcia’s answer before standing up and walking out of the house, not even offering her a goodbye. She watched after him as he walked calmly down to the van parked outside of the house and climbed into the passengers side. Right now she needed to focus on doing more research into the families and try to find any connections but she made a reminder to talk to Reid later on because there was something going on with him she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The car side over to the Lutton house was quiet, the radio played quietly in the background and served as a distraction for Spencer’s mind. He knew he should be thinking about the case and what was going on but he didn’t want to, he wanted some peace for now and that for him now was cheesy bubblegum pop. When they did arrive to the house they were both slow getting out of the car because even if Garcia hadn’t told them the house was supposedly haunted the whole look of the place spoke for itself. They flashed their badges to the police standing outside of the house before walking inside, there was a strange smell almost like rotting fruit that was extremely potent as soon as they entered.

“Someone’s a hoarder.” JJ commented in regards to the boxes piling up, she walked over to one and reached inside before pulling out a handful of things. There were a few flyers for concerts that happened years and years before and a teddy bear with one of its eyes missing, the bear looked and smelt like it had been out in the rain for weeks. She returned the things into the box and peeked into another and found more pointless items, things that looked like they had been picked up off of the street. “A bad one at that.”

Spencer hummed in response but was too busy studying yet another family photograph, this one wasn’t in a nice frame like the Cole’s had been, it was pinned to the wall and had water damage around the edges. The four women in the photo weren’t smiling, the photo looked forced and like none of them wanted it taken. He quickly fished around in his bag for the file he had been given and flipped it open to the Lutton’s page, working out which one was Iris before looking up at the photograph again.

Iris was pretty, she had short dark brown hair and big brown eyes. While being very pretty she also looked sad, there was harsh discolouration underneath her eyes and her posture indicated she was trying to curl up within herself. Spencer didn’t know why she was living with her mom still when she was verging on being twenty six but he was sure they’d find the answer somewhere in the house.

“I’m going to look in Iris’ room, maybe there’s something in there that would tell us where she is.” Spencer didn’t wait for a reply from JJ before he left the room and started walking up the stairs, creaking with each step he took. Each room had a sign taped to it indicating what it was so Spencer slowly walked down the hallway until he arrived at Iris’ room, he pushed the door open slowly with his foot and looked into the room from the doorway first. It wasn’t the room of a twenty five year old, he would have mistaken it for one of the younger sister’s rooms if it had not been for the sign.

Spencer couldn’t say he was surprised that when he walked into the room he found it to be freezing cold, even colder than it had been outside. He wasn’t used to any of this weirdness going on but he certainly wasn’t surprised by it anymore, the source of that rotting smell was also coming from somewhere within the room but Spencer couldn’t target where exactly. It was a reasonably small room, a single bed with a knitted blanket on top which didn’t look slept in, there was a dresser with a large mirror and then a wardrobe in the corner. Along the window sill where photo frames of Iris with who he could only assume were her friends, she was smiling in the majority of them but they looked a few years old.

He had been so focused on the photographs that he hadn’t noticed how the door had slowly been closing, there was no breeze so it was basically moving on his own. Just before it was almost to close softly it suddenly slammed, causing Spencer to spin round and wrestle his gun out of his holster. There was nothing there but he still kept his gun pointed, slowly pressing himself against the wall so nothing could sneak up on him, it wasn’t until he saw something flash in the mirror that he jumped forward and stood in front of the mirror. It had looked like a figure but now he was looking at it there was nothing there but his own scared person.

_“Don’t you like me now?”_

This time Spencer didn’t hesitate to shoot, he turned quickly and shot behind him at what was nothing but the wall. It had felt like there was someone right behind him whispering in his ear, it wasn’t like that morning where the voice was so raspy he couldn’t place a gender upon it. No, this sounded soft and feminine as if it had been a woman, there was still that raspiness but nearly as strong.

JJ had heard the shot from downstairs and dropped what she was holding and rushed up the stairs, expecting Spencer to have found the person who managed to do this to both families when she opened the door but instead found him pointing his gun at the blank wall. All the colour had drained from his face and he looked genuinely scared.

“Spence…what’s going on?” JJ slowly put her gun away and took equally slow steps towards Spencer who at the sound of her voice had snapped out of whatever trance he had been in and hurried to put his gun away and get out of that room. Like Garcia she too had noticed there was something going on with him but she just chalked it down to being a bad day, he’d never done something like this before though and that was a call for concern.

“I just- I thought I saw something and I got freaked out. I guess I’m still tired.” He lied through his teeth, running his hands through his hair as he tried to calm himself down. Tired, that was it. He was just tired, if he slept then maybe it would turn out that this was actually the dream and he wasn’t losing it like he dreaded it would. Spencer hadn’t allowed himself to even humour the idea that he was perhaps starting to show symptoms of schizophrenia but after that it was becoming the preferred option.

JJ just stared at him with eyes full of concern, even when her phone started to ring within her pocket she answered it without taking her eyes off of Spencer. When she heard what Hotch had to say it felt like her heart dropped out of her chest, she must have made a sound because when she looked back to Spencer he was now looking at her. The call was brief and she quickly said goodbye before taking a deep breath and readying herself for what she had to say next.

“The hospital just called…both families just died.”


	3. Chapter Two.

Talking to the families after a loved one had died was, and forever would be the worst part of the job. While on the field you could see the most horrific of crime scenes, people with their bodies ripped apart and bullets laying around them like rose petals on a casket, you heard the worst stories of what people were capable of yet nothing could ever compare to watching someone collapse into themselves at the realisation they had lost a loved one. The tears, screaming to the sky as they begged whatever deity they believed in to bring them home, it tugged at even the most emotionless of people’s heart strings. No one ever wanted to do it but someone had to, living in hope was sometimes worse than living with the reality.

Since whole families had died, there wasn’t really many people to tell. Spencer and JJ had however been given the task to go to Patricia Lutton, mother and grandmother to the deceased and tell her the news. She lived in a nursing home and while by the looks of the records her family hadn’t visited her in a while, with Iris still missing they were talking to anyone they could to find her. No one could understand how she could have caused these deaths but with no other suspects and with the possibility she was the last person to see her family before they had their strokes, she had become a person of interest. Spencer believed with his entire being that she hadn’t done this, he couldn’t explain it but he just knew there was something different going on, this wasn’t that poor woman’s doing.

After his accident back in the Lutton house, it took some convincing for Spencer to be back allowed on the field. He argued that he was fine and had just had a bad night’s sleep, that telling him to go home or take the rest of the day off was pointless and wouldn’t help to work out what on earth was happening in this case. JJ begrudgingly vouched for him to Hotch, even though he believed that he would do better taking some time to rest. He was acting strange, that was apparent to anyone but no one said anything because Spencer was extremely good at pushing his feelings to the back and acting as though they didn’t exist if he really didn’t want to talk about them. He was trained, knew better than to just shoot and especially when there wasn’t anyone there - what if it was a civilian and Spencer just shot them and point blank range? JJ dreaded to think but she wasn’t going to let that happen, she was going to keep her eyes on him at all time and try to figure out for herself what was wrong with him?

As they walked into the nursing home, the receptionist stopped them to ask who they were coming to see, once again mistaking them as a couple which was not an uncommon thing to happen even though JJ had a wedding ring on and Spencer did not. While JJ explained without much detail as to why they were there and who they were looking for, Spencer looked around at the people collecting dust in their chairs and studied the bored expression on their faces. While different, he’d spent time with his mother in a similar establishment after getting her committed when he was eighteen and while he didn’t want to admit, but after every time he left that place he let out a sigh of relief. Not because of being away from his mom but because he couldn’t stand being in a place filled with such potential wasted and sadness, this was like that.

A minute or so later they were being walked over to a lady sat in a vintage looking, floral patterned armchair which was sat beside the window. If there was a nicer view then this might have been a good spot but it only lead out to the dull looking courtyard, grey and rainy and only made for a more depressing atmosphere. Patricia was a small lady, skin loose and wrinkled especially on her hands and sun damage across her face, all the years she had spent alive clearly documented on her skin. A small cross hung from the necklace around her neck and a cigarette lay delicately between her fingers, a veil of smoke practically covering her features which JJ had to cough away as she and Spencer sat down on the chairs pulled out for them by the reception. Despite not having much to do she looked exhausted, from the depressing atmosphere Spencer profiled that dealing with the mental illnesses which came from living in a place like this after being dumped would make anyone exhausted.

“Patricia? I’m Jennifer and this is my colleague Spencer, we are with the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit.” JJ began to explain in that soft voice she saved for days like this, it wasn’t as though she was trying to baby this grown woman but in situations this awful it was nice to be treated with more care than usual. Spencer shot her his usual tight lipped smile at her, wondering if she perhaps knew something because usually people reacted in a certain way when they learnt that the FBI wanted to speak with them, but she had the same neutral expression on her face. She rose the cigarette back to her lips, holding it there for a few seconds before pulling away and blowing out the smoke, only then did she reply.

“What did Iris do?” Patricia’s voice was raspy from all the cigarettes she had smoked but also from all the screaming and shouting she had done when she lived back at home, not this fake home she was now stuck in but the home she grown up in, rose her children in and who they then continued to live in. Spencer and JJ glanced over to one another at the mention of Iris, the fact that she was assumed as have been doing something wrong just made her more suspicious. There was still that instinct within Spencer that made him want to believe she wasn’t responsible for this, he couldn’t pinpoint why since he knew the bare minimum about her and if this weird feeling was gone he would be on board with the theory that she was involved somehow.

“Why do you think Iris did something wrong?” JJ asked slowly, curiosity still seeping out of her tone of voice. As awful as this case was, it was difficult to not be intrigued by it because it was so strange and out of the norm of what they were used to. She almost expected Spencer to be more involved than he actually was, he should have been coming up with theories and telling everyone random facts they weren’t sure now he knew but ended up actually being helpful. He was just sombre, an air of tension surrounding him and clouding his thoughts. Patricia sighed and put her soon to die cigarette into the ashtray which was soon to overflow with the corpses of old cigarettes, she didn’t want to open up old wounds but what else was there to do? At least she had someone to talk to.

“That girl’s got the devil in her, ever since she was a ‘lil one. The other girls, they’re good, pure, but that one has her demons.” Patricia explained, there was not an ounce of her being that did not believe that there was something strange going on with Iris. Ever since she was a little girl, complaining about being hurt by thin air and not being able to sleep due to paralysing fear that something was watching her. It wasn’t as though no one believed her, the problem was they did and what it was leading her family to believe was that she was being haunted and watched by a demon. Other families who believed this might have tried to do something to help her, take her to get an exorcism or whatever it was you did when a demon was around but the Lutton answer was to just neglect her and pray for the rest of the family to remain safe. “If something happened that needed the FBI to come in, then it’s her fault.”

Spencer felt his jaw tighten and his hands involuntarily ball up into fists, desperately trying not to get himself worked up as Patricia continued to explain the reasons why she thought Iris was a bad kid. It sounded so similar to his own childhood, details like how her father left because of her mother’s issues (those issues being her obsessive compulsive disorder which was the main cause of her hoarding, not that different from his mother’s own issues as they were both psychotic disorders) and how she would complain of waking up and feeling as though she was being pinned down on the bed, things Spencer had never told another person he had experienced. He could justify these things though, mental illnesses were powerful and she could easily have been struggling with something from a young age, anything than the much scarier possibility.

“We don’t know where Iris is, we were wondering if you had any ideas?” JJ decided to get this part out of the way first in case after she shared the news of the rest of the family Patricia just broke down. The older lady’s expression stayed neutral, wondering to herself why the FBI had been called in to look for her granddaughter, it only solidified her theory that she had done something terrible. She stayed quiet, reaching down to the small silver cross hanging down to her collarbones and rotated it between her fingers as she thought back, both wanting to cooperate but also not being too bothered by the fact Iris was missing. JJ couldn’t understand that, if anyone in her family went missing she wouldn’t stop until she found them, it didn’t matter if they were friendly or not because family was family - that was all that mattered.

“Haven’t seen her in years, wouldn’t know.” Patricia said bluntly before quickly letting go of her cross, so fast it appeared as though she had been shocked. Spencer had been quiet but studying her body language, seeing if he could learn anything that would help them out as while she was cooperated, the information she was giving wasn’t exactly the most helpful. Until now she had seemed very relaxed, perhaps not that keen on talking about her granddaughter but not uncomfortable by the topic. Something had changed though, her shoulders had raised up in almost a defensive way and the tension was evident in her posture, whatever it was she remembered she did not want to tell it. There was no way to force her though and with the news they had to share next, it was probably for the best they don’t push any harder.

Penelope had heard about the incident Spencer had back at the house and it had only increased the amount of worrying she had been doing over him. It was as clear as day that something was on his mind and while he wasn’t exactly the time to be the most open about things, after being prompted a few times he would usually let whatever was bothering him out but this was a completely different situation. She wanted to help but until that morning he had been completely fine, at first she thought it was just the case was strange and the fact he couldn’t crack it was bothering him but that didn’t explain his almost distant approach to things, to his coworkers. Penelope waited until Spencer had asked what he wanted and she had helped in any way she could before she asked how he was.

“Before you go- are you okay?” Penelope knew that Spencer wouldn’t be completely honest but for her own sake she needed to ask, she couldn’t just sit there with the question eating away at her because the rest of the team needed her on full alert. Spencer held back his sigh and instead just closed his eyes, shivering slightly from the cold wind but now he could only equate shivers to the presence of something bad. He wasn’t okay, he wasn’t himself and everything he stood so strongly for was being questioned and that would frighten even the strongest of people. Telling anyone any of this was worse than any sort of turmoil he could deal with on the inside, he’d been an outsider his whole life and now he’d finally moved on with things and was a new person from the little boy terrified of every action he made. All he wanted was to solve this case and continue to move along.

“You don’t have to worry about me.” Spencer turned and looked back into the nursing home, through the glass panel on the door he could see JJ with her hand laying comfortingly on Patricia’s knee. She didn’t look that shocked, wasn’t crying or collapsing which was the usual reaction someone gave when you told them that their family had all just died. He could tell himself that she was just in shock and that was why she wasn’t reacting in the usual way but something was off, he couldn’t explain it but he just knew there was something she wasn’t telling them. In his ear despite not paying attention he could hear Penelope signing off which brought him out of his thoughts. “Garcia, wait. There is something you could do for me.”

“Anything, what do you need?” Penelope straightened up in her chair at the prospect of helping Spencer out, and the case of course but mostly her friend. She didn’t know what he needed but she was hoping it wasn’t something to do with the case, while she wasn’t needed she had done some more digging into the families and more importantly the houses they grew up in. If there was anyone on the team who was going to get spooked out by the talk of ghosts and demons it was her, even though everyone had essentially told her that they didn’t think there was anything about both houses being considered haunted that related back to the deaths, Penelope just couldn’t let it go.

There just wasn’t any other common denominator, both families came from different backgrounds, had different incomes and jobs and apart from the fact they had both died in this freak way, there was nothing else relating them. It was frustrating, she’d dug through everything and then some but still no explanations had risen up. She felt like she’d failed, herself, her team and then these poor families who’d had their lives ripped away from them. Penelope wished it made her more determined to figure something out but it only wore her out more, she hoped that hopefully Spencer thought of something she hadn’t.

“Did you look more into the reasons both family’s houses were considered haunted? I was thinking that perhaps if people died in either houses they might be the link we’ve been looking for.” Spencer could only hypothesise, with no witnesses willing to talk and one missing there wasn’t much else they could do but guess work. The first thing you do when put on a case is look at victimology and that was where they were stuck, the lack of relation between the families would otherwise indicate a kill of opportunity but they were also personal, you didn’t just murder two families in such a horrific way for no reason. Even if the reason was a dumb one like they took the last bottle of semi skimmed milk at the grocery store or cut you off in traffic, a reason was a reason. There was none of that here, no motive whatsoever.

“I did and there was one back in the 40s but that was it, in the Lutton’s home. Well, kind of, there’s no actual documentation of someone dying but there’s plenty of people who were gossiping about a little boy who lived in that house and went missing. And before you ask yes, I’m looking into the family of said child and trying to find a connection, and while i’m at it I’ll look into who built both houses and see if there’s a connection there.” Penelope rambled on but railed back her usual quirkiness, not wanting to overwhelm the already racing mind of her genius friend. Spencer knew there was nothing else he could say without making himself appear unfit for field work, so he instead just thanked Garcia and proceeded to hang up. She was used to abrupt endings and usually was the one giving them but there was something about the emptiness from the end of the line that made her stomach sink.

At the sound of the door behind him opening, Spencer turned around and came face to face with JJ. She gave him a sad smile before walking past him and down the steps, heading to their car parked in front of the building. Spencer knew this case would be hitting her hard, she was a family person and sometimes pictured herself in the victims positions a little too much, it was something the whole team was guilty of but JJ took it the hardest. As he began to walk towards the car the need to yawn overtook him, he was exhausted emotionally more than anything and at that moment wanted nothing more than to sleep but that childlike fear of not wanting to sleep because of the monsters under the bed seemed to be returning.

“Coffee?” JJ asked once Spencer climbed into the passenger’s seat, he wasn’t the only one who was tired and she knew the rest of the team who had been stuck at the local police precinct for hours probably felt the same way. Spencer rested his head against the headrest and turned to face her, managing a small smile to match the one she gave him. He wasn’t sure he could even stomach the coffee he loved so much and practically lived on but for the sake of appearing like normal, and to but his friend’s mind at rest he agreed.

“Coffee.”


End file.
